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Faculty Members Call for Divestment

4.10.14

Background photograph by iStock

Just three days after President Drew Faust outlined
Harvard’s role and actions in combating climate change, nearly 100 faculty
members called on the president and the Harvard Corporation to do more. The signers of an open letter calling for
divestment include leading atmospheric scientists, distinguished professors
from a wide range of academic departments, affiliates from nearly every school at Harvard,
several department heads, and members of the scientific community. They
emphasize the overwhelming evidence of fossil fuel as a primary cause of
climate change, and decry what they call the industry’s expenditure of “large sums of money to mislead the public, deny climate
science, control legislation and regulation, and suppress alternative energy
sources.”

“Our sense of urgency in
signing this letter cannot be overstated,” the authors write.

Humanity’s
reliance on burning fossil fuels is leading to a marked warming of the Earth’s
surface, a melting of ice the world over, a rise in sea levels, acidification
of the oceans, and an extreme, wildly fluctuating, and unstable global climate. These
physical and chemical changes, some of which are expected to last hundreds, if
not thousands, of years are already threatening the survival of countless
species on all continents. And because of their effects on food
production, water availability, air pollution, and the emergence and spread of
human infectious diseases, they pose unparalleled risks to human health and
life.

The
letter goes on to argue that planned divestment would hurt neither Harvard nor
the corporations from which the University might divest. Instead, the letter
argues, “divestment aims to expose corporate attitudes and change corporate
behavior.”

The authors frame divestment as an act of ethical responsibility, “a protest
against current practices that cannot be altered as quickly or effectively by
other means. The University either invests in fossil fuel corporations, or
it divests,” the letter continues. “If the Corporation regards divestment as
‘political,’ then its continued investment is a similarly political act, one
that finances present corporate activities and calculates profit from them. The
only way to remain ‘neutral’ in such circumstances,” the letter states, “is to
bracket ethical principles even while being deeply concerned about
consequences. Slavery was once an investment issue, as were apartheid and
the harm caused by smoking.”

Noting
that Harvard has divested in the past, the letter’s authors say that Faust’s
statements on the issue to date “appear to misconstrue the purposes and
effectiveness of divestment. We believe that the Corporation is making a
decision that in the long run will not serve the University well.”

In response, the University issued the following statement:

President Faust
recognizes that how best to respond to the threat of climate change is a
question on which thoughtful people hold differing views. As she has written to
the Harvard community, her focus is on how the University’s research and
education programs can accelerate the transition to renewable sources of
energy, how our institutional practices can best model a commitment to
sustainability, and how our investments can take appropriate account of
environmental, social, and governance factors in ways that advance the
endowment’s paramount aim of supporting Harvard’s academic mission.

This story was updated at 7:15 PM on 4-10-2014 to include the University’s statement in response to the open letter.